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By the time you read this, we may know more about Robinson’s background and motivations. But based on past experience, I don’t expect those details, no matter what they reveal, to change much about the debate over Kirk’s killing.

If there’s one thing America has proved again and again, it’s that no shooting, no matter how deadly or high profile, ever changes much of anything. In the U.S., gun murders are part of the fabric, not just of school life and work life, but of political life too. Kirk himself knew that. He considered gun deaths part of the grand American bargain. “I think it’s worth it,” he said in 2023. “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”

Nothing changed in America after a depressed student murdered 32 classmates at Virginia Tech university in 2007. Nothing changed after 26 children were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary. Nothing changed after Dylann Roof murdered nine Black parishioners at Emanuel Methodist Church. Nothing changed after James Hodgkinson shot up a Congressional baseball practice. Nothing changed after Vance Boelter murdered Minnesota State Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband this summer. 

Trump held a parade the day Hortman died. I was there. He didn’t even mention her name.

So no, I don’t think Kirk’s murder will be an inflection point in American history. I don’t think it will lead to any actual changes, at least not the kind that would result in fewer gun deaths or less violence in America. I was in Milwaukee, at the Republican National Convention, days after Trump himself was shot and nearly killed at a rally in Pennsylvania in the summer of 2024. I remember all the columns and punditry about how everything had changed, how he had changed, how the race had changed, how politics must change.

Nothing changed. Two weeks later, it was barely a story.

I suspect the same will happen with Kirk’s murder. There is simply no appetite in the American circles that matter for comprehensive gun control, which is the only thing we know would lead to less shootings in America, political or otherwise. So instead of action, we’ll get a few weeks of talk, about tone and anger, and healing divides (which is ironic, because few Americans have ever worked harder to divide America than Kirk) and then everything will go back to the way it was.

Even Trump himself is already moving on.

“Mr. President, my condolences to you, sir. My condolences on the loss of your friend Charlie Kirk,” a reporter said to him on the White House lawn Friday morning. “How are you holding up over the last day and a half, sir?”

“I think very good,” Trump replied. “And by the way, right there, you see all the trucks? They’ve just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they’ve been trying to get, as you know, for about 150 years. And it’s gonna be a beauty.”

What will happen, and is, in fact, already underway, is a war not over Kirk’s death but over his life. Despite many Republican (and in Canada, some Conservative) claims otherwise, no credible left or centrist figure I’ve seen has called Kirk’s murder anything but tragic. But acknowledging that — and I do, no one, Kirk, included, deserves to be murdered — doesn’t mean whitewashing his life. Kirk spent his adult life fighting for Trump and Trumpism. His organizations paid to bus “patriots” to Washington on Jan. 6. He once called for a “patriot” to bail the man who beat Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer out of jail. “If I see a Black pilot,” he once said on a podcast, “I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’”

People on the right are already trying to turn Kirk into a martyr for free speech, a model for political involvement, a defining American of his day. It’s not a compliment to say that only on the last of those do I agree.